Slashdot Mirror
Visual Map of Unix history
psychosis writes "A friend pointed me towards this site that has a really interesting diagram of the History of Unix. It shows where all the development splits occured, recombined, and dissolved into the ether. The diagram is available in several different formats (html, pdf, and PS), so all can enjoy!"
Visual map of Windows History
--
I suppose being one of the four founders of Sun, as Bill was, could be read as being hired by Sun, in a sense. :-)
However, I don't think any of the other core BSD guys were Sun employees - Kirk McKusick wasn't (I seem to remember he may have consulted at Sun, but he wasn't on the payroll), and neither was Sam Leffler (he went to SGI, not Sun); I forget whether Mike Karels was involved with 4BSD or 2BSD at that time Sun was founded - in any case, he also wasn't ever a Sun employee, as far as I know.
They hired Rick Rashid for Microsoft Research, but that was, I think, well after NT was shipped. They may have hired other Mach people to work on NT, but I don't know of any myself, for what that's worth.
They did hire a guy from Digital Equipment Corporation, Dave Cutler, to be one of the architects of NT (perhaps the chief architect, although in the foreword to the first edition of Inside Windows NT he just says "I must say that I did not design Windows NT -- I was merely one of the contributors to the design of the system.")
The I/O subsystem of NT looks somewhat VMSish, but I suspect the VMS I/O subsystem looks somewhat RSX-11M-ish; I suspect Cutler was responsible for much of the design of all three I/O subsystems (which does not mean that he necessarily used any VMS code in NT, it may just mean he reused earlier ideas of his).
Am I the only one that thought about the southern joke "...his family tree doesn't fork"?
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
The thing that makes Linux Unix-like (libc, shell tools, etcetera) is the GNU System, which was started in 1983, but doesn't appear anywhere in the chart.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
What about Coherent, a V7 clone for 8086/80286 from Mark Williams Corp. and QNX?
I'm a bit suprised that these two are missing, but XINU has made it onto the chart, even though it doesn't show any actual inheritance from any unix strain (and rightly so: XINU's only relationship to unix, aside from the name, was entirely spiritual).
The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common error.
... and replacing them with a diagram showing the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases ...
I think the creator of the chart is well aware of what a "Unix system" really means. Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel", in the right context. This is no exception.
Drawing the picture this way gives too much credit to Linus Torvalds...
There is no mention of Linus anywhere on the chart or the web page. Furthermore, the diagram itself is not, as near as I can tell, about giving credit for anything. It merely tracks code forks.
The folks who gave you the hundred-odd programs required by Posix plus all the development tools, mainly the FSF and its army of volunteers and the folks at Cygnus...
Your average Linux distro includes a number of utilities from the BSDs, as well. (Indeed, pretty much any Unix these days encorporates ideas, if not code, from BSD.)
Even more important, the folks like Peter McDonald, Adam Richter, and Patrick Volkering...
Indeed. I wonder if we should include people like ESR and companies like Red Hat, who have been largely responsible for bringing Free Software onto the corporate map?
The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux kernels
That would not "fix" anything, only expand it. The "Linux" branch includes all of those implictly.
I do think a diagram of the history of the Linux distros, in the same spirit as this one, is a cool idea, though.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Oddly... BASIC is not mentioned anythere there. Basic has evolved quite a bit from what it used to be..
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Not only is there a Unix History tree, a friend of mine and I have been putting together a whole computer history tree. Check it out at comp-hist.sourceforge.net.
Fascinating map, I could spend hours just researching from it to find out what the actual relationships are (i.e. what portions of OS A were integrated into OS B)...
One thing: IRIX is shown beginning around 1986 right out of the blue. According to SGI.com's section on IRIX, it was incepted in '82. I'm curious which it is, and whether it was derived or really conjured up from scratch.
The only others that appear out of thin air (other than UNICS) are Minix, Xinu, and Mach (A/UX briefly so before getting BSDed). Does anyone know if IRIX, like these, was an original design? It's certainly unique in its own right.
Also, did I miss UNICOS in there? As I understand it, it is a UNIX (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck) derived from SysV with some BSDisms thrown in... showed up in '85, I reckon.
... and especially, it doesn't show all the rebooting :)
What !?!?! No 2.4.0-test7/pre7???
Those bastards!
"Your pen is bugged..." "How do you know? " "This is an action thriller"
...where Unix stopped being an OS.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common error. Every Unix or Unix-like distribution listed in the picture consists not only of a kernel, but of hundreds of utilities (all the little programs that you can count on having in your /bin and /usr/bin directories).
Drawing the picture this way gives too much
credit to Linus Torvalds and too little to two
other groups of heros:
The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux kernels (or at least putting in large asterisks making sure that these are kernels only) and replacing them with a diagram showing the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases, with the branching relationships showing how the later distributions depend on the earlier ones.
The authors leave out the hordes of lesser known Unicies. I'm sure the graph would be completely unreadable if any of these were included.
Does anyone remember MIPS Unix? I'm not sure of it's origins, but I think MIPS made it before SGI bought them outright (although I think it was still maintained despite the fact SGI had their own version of Unix, IRIX).
Or what about Amiga UNIX (Aka AMIX)? From what I remember, this was a straight port of V.5.
And of course, there was Data General's DG/UX for the Motorola 88K series of RISC processors. And even Dell had their own Unix for a while. And this isn't counting all the versions of companies that went under, and all the tweaked versions used in academia...
fork(), anyone?
I'd like to see just a general OS tree... not even as specific as this one, but one that relates *nix, basic (apple and commodore versions...), even (grr) MS OSs... even if it leaves out several revisions and what not, I'm sure connections and relations would be very interesting..
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
...especially the part where Minix is just coasting along, and then... "Look! that little line poking out. Whazzit say? Linux 0.0.1?"
Kinda makes you proud.
It interesting to see how Linux progresses as compared to, say, Irix. Linux progresses, and each branch (from kernel 2.0 to 2.1) is the "new" Linux, with the old branch dying off, while Irix runs in a straight, continuous line.
Looks kinda Darwinian, in fact. If I may make a poor analogy, it's like the difference between balancing a pole on it's end, and balancing a tripod.
I'm still scared of the person that took the time to put that together, though...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
here is the source for the first linux kernels:
linux0.1
Name: Linux 0.1
Date: 1991-09-17
Reference: http://www.memalpha.cx/Linux/Kernel/Master.html
Influenced by minix1.5.10
linux0.2
Name: Linux 0.3
Date: 1991-10-05
Reference: a printed calendar
Successor to linux0.1
greetings, eMBee.
--
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
Also very interesting, chart of the history of computer languages:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/lang/
And not as complicated, history of DOS and Windows:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/windows/